Wheelgirl

Kindle eBook Reader from Amazon: Excite or Burn?

Amazon released its eBook reader, Kindle Um, I can't really say I like the name. Given the historical associations of bonfires and books, it forces a jump in my brain to "kindling". Also, I can see most people in a shopping frenzy checking around for "Kindel" the eBook reader. (Amazon has anticipated this by including the incorrect spelling in its online ad campaigns. But if this holiday season, grandma gives you a wingback chair from 100-year-old heritage-style furniture maker, Kindle, you have been warned.)

Anyway, although the general reviews, for what they are worth, were not excellent. There is already a discussion group for the Kindle that you can access before deciding it it could be your device of choice.

Gizmodo has a bunch of reviews and comments about the Amazon Kindle .(You can also check out the Wheelgirl.com site book-related page for more information on eBook readers such as the Sony PRS500 )

What do you do if you don't see an eBook reader you like?  Have an old-fashioned holiday celebration. Give someone a few books that don't require electric power.

All photos lifted from the Amazon site.

iLiad & Electronic Paper, Not New, But Still Cool,

None of this is terrribly new.  Writing tablets and digital sketch stuff has been on the market for years. Ebook readers have been around for years. But this holiday season, your relatives who read but are not technophiles may come in closer contact with ebooks. Borders is going to be selling the Sony PRS-500 ebook reader.

A little googling to try to find the epaper technology to which I made reference in a Sony PRS-500 post, and I found iRex Technologies, a corp. that makes an epaper device, the wireless iLiad reader, which is linux based. (So development possibilities abound.)

The iLiad is a reader, but also has a bunch of other features. You can draw and write with a stylis, so you can digitize your sketches and drawings. And a couple of European newspapers are using the iLiad in conjunction with their daily subscription newspaper service. Basically, people get their daily papers wirelessly delivered on the tablet. And they don't have to drag their recycle bins to their curbs once a week.

The iLiad runs about $699 and the Sony PRS-500 is about $300.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad

You Love Books, and You Think You're Detail Oriented?

Brian Dettmer uses surgical tools and tweezers to remove parts of book pages. Yeah, you used to be the most detail-oriented person you ever knew. Not anymore, sweetie pie.

http://www.joshspear.com/item/brian-dettmer/

Sony's Latest eBook Reader PRS-505

Basically, if you don't want to listen to digital information in the form of books, you can look at digital information in the form of books. Sony's device will let you carry around digital books. I remember hearing in the late 1990s about a paper PARC Xerox (?) was working on that was composed of little cells filled with oil. The idea was that an information transmission via some wave or another could rearrange the oil so that you saw black-on-white text. Then, you could delete the info. and wait for another transmission. The idea was that newspapers and books could be generated daily, and we wouldn't have to throw away heaps of paper every day.

Well, it is a decade later, and this device is what is available for 300 beans. Sony has about 20,000 titles available for reading with the reader, and they are adding more titles and publishers.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14387

Thanks to a Lady, We Have Laureate

Charles Simic Named U.S. Poet Laureate

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet succeeds Donald Hall and joins a list of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Ted Kooser, Louise Gluck, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Rita Dove and Robert Penn Warren."...

"Simic, who lives in Strafford New Hampshire, arrived in the United States in 1954 and said he started writing poetry in high school to get girls' attention."

If you have to sit around and wait for friends and loved ones to get out from work or school, bring a copy of Robert Pinsky's The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, Bilingual Edition (Paperback). It is a gorgeous way to wait. Lose yourself in several lines of poetry, and you will be happy that you are sitting alone in the cold car or on a park bench.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070802/us_nm/usa_poet_dc